Given the slowness of transatlantic communications at the time, it was September before anybody in Britain knew about what happened in the American colonies on 4 July 1776. And the situation persisted. The most famous battle of the War of 1812 was fought after the Treaty of Ghent ended the war itse...

May 16, 2001, was fairly uneventful , but it must have taken some extensive research to prove that definitively. Powers &8^] On Good Friday 1930, the BBC reported that there was "no news" in it's bulletin and played music instead. And on July 4th, 1776, George III made an entry in his...

Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (or Fudge). (Learning to read music, the lines in the treble clef from bottom up. The Moody Blues used that for the title of an album.) Of course, being British, they spelled it "Favour". We were taught it as "Every Good Boy Does Fine", and for the ...

Creepy fact on which to base your next school report: Berlin Wall, 29 years. World Trade Center, 28 years. How is that creepy? Coupla things for next year's Beloit Mindset List: The WTC has always been a memorial, and incumbent political parties have never nominated the sitting vice president as th...

Where will the proposed wall between the US and Mexico actually be? Berlin. They do the best walls! That wall didn't even last 30 years, if you want something that will last talk to the Chinese. Creepy fact on which to base your next school report: Berlin Wall, 29 years. World Trade Center, 28 years.

The answer to "the address of my home changed" is to send a GPS device to the previous address, and move to wherever it's delivered to. Someone once left a GPS receiver atop the trunk of my car at my home here in Phoenix. I decided to attempt to find the owner, and after asking a few neig...

I'm not too fond of downer endings (though their existence might play a role in suspense as to whether or not the story will have a happy ending; not that suspense as to how can't be comparably memorable) but bittersweet ones are a good way of saying "some things will work out, some won't.&quo...

The town I lived in for pretty much all of the 1960s no longer exists, except as an "historic district" within the third largest city in Los Angeles County. The hospital where I had my first job (unpaid) is no more, and in fact the building itself hasn't existed for over a decade. The firs...

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people... Surely it's the spaceship people we've taken three months longer than? The airplane people had all of human history to get to the Wright brothers. No, just since someone figured out how to fold a piece of paper into a glider. ...

Feynman complains in his book about the trig notation for exactly this reason: i.e. that it looks like multiplication. He invented his own notation for sin (a kind of sigma with a long top bit iirc). Personally I'm more disturbed by upper indices that aren't exponentiation. I've always been a littl...

Feynman complains in his book about the trig notation for exactly this reason: i.e. that it looks like multiplication. He invented his own notation for sin (a kind of sigma with a long top bit iirc). Personally I'm more disturbed by upper indices that aren't exponentiation. I've always been a littl...

Plus, schools are very common voting locations and a week off school might make all the munchkins happy, but not the taxpayers paying to educate the munchkins. Or parents. Replacing the schools with new polling locations would be tough. For what it's worth, in my town they used the elementary schoo...

All this political talk and I'm just wondering how Randall picked which landmarks to include. :P I happen to be pumped because he included Hatcher Pass and Summit Lake (north of Wasilla, AK) because that happens to be my favorite few square miles on the planet. Not far from me, he included Heart At...

How do you zoom with a mouse? Edit: Figured it out. If you're still trying to, it's double-click. There doesn't seem to be a way to pinch. The four-way race for Mayor of Phoenix (replacing the resigned incumbent) isn't listed, nor is the AZ Secretary of State, who is effectively the Lieutenant Gover...

... I was thinking it might work without you making any sound at all, just moving your (normal) mouth-parts, ... Wow, flashed back to one of Asimov's Foundation stories. Silently talking would send the words to a receiver who could talk to you through tiny speakers in your skull.... read it decades...

I'm off the graph to the right. I wouldn't even have a texting feature available if not for the handful of people who can't think of any other way to communicate. (That goes for the guy who I contacted to repair my gate after it got pulled off the hinges, whose first response was "text me a pic...

In one of my calculus classes, the professor offered us extra credit on an assignment if we could name a device used for direct measurement of arc length. He refused to accept my response of "opisometer", even after I brought one, in its case, to class. (I think it later developed he was l...

The book Lord of the Flies just baffled me when I read it in ninth grade, but maybe I would like it better if I gave it a second try. I'll probably never know. It certainly doesn't represent the way people actually behave when in these types of situations (which actually happen occasionally in the ...

This is just one of the oldest questions in aesthetics: Why do we enjoy watching bad things? Horror is watching scary things, drama is watching sad things, comedy is watching stupid things, mystery is watching things that don't make sense, action is watching dangerous things. There now. That wasn't...

And roller coasters. I don't get those either. And coloring books. And parades. And, for the most part, fireworks displays. And just about all sports. I can understand being scared of fireworks displays, and I suppose parades have the danger of possibly including scary clowns, but coloring books? I...

I was watching an episode of the '90s reboot of "Outer Limits" last night when the main character answered her phone right after hanging up on someone else she didn't want to talk to. Her entire end of the conversation was "I don't want to change my long-distance carrier", which ...

Look up Barium Swallow Tests. You can basically see this comic IRL. They're pretty freaky. Oooh, I've done one of those before. They were checking the extent of a gastric fistula (remnant of a neo-natal feeding tube) that had opened up enough to become a middle-school annoyance. The stuff tasted li...

The Japanese term for stroller is “baby car” (ベビーカー) which fits the pattern and always gets a brain giggle from me despite just being a slightly shorter version of the (giggle-free) ‘baby carriage’. A crib is also called a “baby bed” (ベビーベッド) and a playpen is called a ‘baby circle’ (ベビーサークル). By al...

Cueball's system get really messed up above the arctic circle. Adjusting the seconds to meet his conditions would make them last longer than a day. Eskimo astrologers are no doubt familiar with the problem of births at or near the solstices, when a natal chart may have no fourth or tenth house what...